Front door, back door or revolving door? Where to in Romanian prisons?

• In Event: Prison Working Group: Recidivism trends and consequences

Abstract

Romania's prison system is under severe pressure. After the pilot judgment of 25 April 2017 (Rezmiveș and others v. Romania), two objectives had to be assumed, exhaustively motivated by the Strasbourg Court: solving overcrowding and improving poor detention conditions. With regard to the first objective, the European court's judgment was based on the reductionist model of policy, masterfully theorized by Rutherford, and involved two strategies. The first (front door strategy) concerns the initiative to limit prison admissions through decriminalization, encouraging the use of prison as a last resort and through the effective application of non-custodial sanctions and measures. The second (back door strategy) aims to keep convicts in prison as short as possible, using various means of early release from prison. Romania has successfully applied the second approach, but only in the short term, experiencing now an upward trend in the size of the prison population. The first strategy has been timidly pursued and has met with strong resistance from a neo-retributivism perspective, which advocates increasing the importance of deprivation of liberty as a crime control solution. This study analyses some initiatives aimed at optimizing the functioning of the Romanian penitentiary system in terms of reducing the number of prisoners. These initiatives apparently operate only at a minimal level, as there is a strong residual component generated by the revolving-door syndrome (prison recidivism) that causes overcrowding to return after a while.

Author

• Flaviu Ciopec, Law Faculty West University of Timisoara Romania